What connections with the living and the dead did the names of medieval men and women – rich and poor, urban and rural – convey? What relations, for example, did they establish with saints, relatives, neighbours, and powerful men? Or with local peculiarities and developments over time? Again: can onomastics be regarded as a source for the study of medieval social identities and political institutions?
Such are the questions from which the Nomina project plans to set out in order to approach the study of personal names (not surnames) in late medieval Italy in an innovative way, providing an original contribution to some of the main topics in social and political history.
The first new feature is the spatial and chronological context of the enquiry: 14th- and 15th-century Italy as a whole, which so far has hardly been investigated from the point of view of onomastics, particularly when it comes to the female and rural worlds, and lower-middle urban social strata. But what is also, and especially, innovative is the perspective of the enquiry. So far, the study of personal names – which has always been closely connected to research on the emergence of surnames – has chiefly been regarded as a way to investigate changes in kinship structures. Without wishing to deny the validity of this approach, the project aims to explore onomastic sources from a different angle by highlighting the interaction between individual names and other forms of political and social identity. In late medieval Italy, names were no doubt a (biological and spiritual) family affair. But how do they reflect individuals’ belonging to specific communities, professions, and classes? What was the weight of political loyalties? How did socio-economic inequality translate onto the onomastic level? And how can all these problems be defined in relation to gender differences? We believe that the study of personal names, in addition to constituting a largely unexplored field of enquiry, might also pave the way to approach many crucial topics in Medieval Studies in a radically new way: for example the connection between rulers and the ruled and the relationship between men and women on the one hand; and class, communal, and professional institutions on the other.
Finally, particular attention will be devoted to the circulation of the research results among a wider public, especially in primary schools. By virtue of their importance in the relational definition of individual identity, personal names have long been the focus of childhood educational projects. Nomina aims to connect with the latter by devoting specific economic and human resources to ways of promoting a historical approach to one’s own identity based on onomastics even among schoolchildren.